Ross Douthat Quotes

The American people know that we cannot spend our way to prosperity.

I am a deficit hawk.

I personally do not worship at the alter of a balanced budget.

With its record spending and deficits, the Obama administration has shown little interest in taking fiscal responsibility. That is a mistake.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

Bush has never sent over a balanced budget.

There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.

The best thing to hold down spending is to have a Democratic President and a Republican Congress.

Like Ike [President Eisenhower] did. Talk economy and then spend away.

Washington has to stop spending money we don’t have for projects we don’t want.

I'm for a balanced budget now.

Defense spending as a share of the economy dropped significantly during the early 1990s, and that was one of the things, along with other policy changes, that put us back on the path to a balanced budget.

Reagan proved deficits don't matter.

I don't have many litmus tests, but this is one: Any candidate who doesn't understand that we need to balance the budget should not be president of the United States.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

We can't have deficit spending in Texas. You have to balance your budget every two years.

Look, I'm very much in favor of tax cuts, but not with borrowed money. And the problem that we've gotten into in recent years is spending programs with borrowed money, tax cuts with borrowed money, and at the end of the day that proves disastrous. And my view is I don't think we can play subtle policy here.

Now make no mistake, I think we need a strong dose of fiscal conservatism in Washington, D.C.

Even with not having a balanced budget at this time, I support tax cuts. That will help limit spending.

States, virtually all of them, have a constitutional requirement to operate on a balanced budget.

I've criticized Republicans for their lack of fiscal discipline when they controlled Congress before 2007. However, that is no excuse to just continue with more of the same or, as the case is now, to make it worse. Under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's budget, we will double the national debt in five years and triple it in 10.

If you ask people do you think that government should spend less money than what it takes in, most people agree with that.

The deficit only became a big problem in the Reagan-Bush years. For 12 years, Republican presidents talked about balancing the budget, but failed to propose one.

The most remarkable thing about Calvin Coolidge is that he served for 67 months, and when he left office, the budget was lower than he came in. In real terms - in nominal terms with vanilla on top - he cut the budget year over year.

Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.